Caddyshack II (1988)

Jackie Mason Re-adjusts His Stand-Up Persona

By CARYN JAMES

Published: July 23, 1988

Fans of Jackie Mason's one-man Broadway show should beware of ''Caddyshack II,'' the latest step in the comedian's reborn career.

If the star is smart, he'll claim to have sent a twin brother or a clone off to Hollywood; the film features someone who walks like Jackie Mason, talks like Jackie Mason, does everything except make people laugh like Jackie Mason.

This sequel to the 1980 film that starred Rodney Dangerfield and Bill Murray is set in the same country club, Bushwood. Mr. Mason is a self-made millionaire named Jack Hartounian, whose daughter wants to become a club member along with her Radcliffe roommate, Miffy. The script possibilities amount to this: Mr. Mason wears purple suits with garish pink ties and invades the club, where Miffy's mother (Dina Merrill) always wears white gloves.

Hartounian has little to do with Mr. Mason's acerbic stage persona, wasting the only opportunity to redeem this humorless script. Instead, he is gauche but the salt of the earth (his company even builds low-rent apartment houses). The rich snobs bar him from the club, of course, so he gets even by buying it and turning it into a theme park called ''Jacky's Wacky Golf.'' Anything that has to tell you it's wacky probably isn't, and this film practically yells in desperation, ''I'm wacky! I'm wacky!''

''Caddyshack II,'' which opened yesterday at the Criterion Center and other theaters, piles on people who have been more successful in films that seem to have had scripts. Dyan Cannon is Miffy's cousin, the only other person at the club as gauche as Jack. Chevy Chase is innocuous as the wealthy man who sells him Bushwood. And Dan Ackroyd has never been more irritating as a former marine hired to eliminate Jack.

If Mr. Mason hopes to make the kind of segue from stand-up comedy to movies that Mr. Dangerfield did, he and his advisers better think again. ''Caddyshack II'' is the kind of film that sends careers spiraling downward.

Pink Ties And White Gloves

CADDYSHACK II, directed by Allan Arkush; written by Harold Ramis and Peter Torokvei; director of photography, Harry Stra=dling; edited by Bernard Gribble; music by Ira Newborn; production designer, Bill Matthews; produced by Neil Canton; released by Warner Brothers. At Criterion Center, Broadway at 45th Street; Plaza, 58th Street east of Madison Avenue and other theaters. Running time: 103 minutes. This film is rated PG.